FAQ

Through its SaaS-based platform, PagerDuty empowers developers, DevOps, IT operations and business leaders to prevent and resolve business-impacting incidents for exceptional customer experience. When revenue and brand reputation depends on customer satisfaction, PagerDuty arms organizations with the insight to proactively manage events that may impact customers across their IT environment. With hundreds of native integrations, on-call scheduling & escalations, machine learning, business-wide response orchestration, analytics, and much more, PagerDuty gets the right data in the hands of the right people in real time, every time.

Yes. PagerDuty allows you to group integrations into services that mirror your service-oriented architecture. Each PagerDuty service has its own associated notification and escalation rules (these are called “escalation policies”). This automatically routes issues to the people best able to resolve them. For example, you might want to create an escalation policy for your database administrator team, and use this policy for all services that integrate with database monitoring systems. This ensures that database problems are always forwarded to a database specialist.

PagerDuty can automatically group related alerts into a single incident to minimize noise while centralizing relevant context. Incident notifications are automatically sent using any preferred combination of phone calls, SMS, push notifications and emails. You can customize these notification methods (within the settings for each service), so that incidents dynamically select the right notification behavior depending on their severity, time of day, or during defined support hours.

PagerDuty asks users to confirm that they’ve received an SMS by replying to it. Similarly, our automated phone calls ask users to make a selection from a voice menu of possible incident options. You can configure PagerDuty to repeat the call or message if a notification isn’t replied to.

PagerDuty allows you to specify comprehensive escalation rules. When an incident is triggered, PagerDuty will first try to contact the level-one on-call responder for the incident. If that person doesn’t answer within the user-specified escalation timeout (which you can define per your SLA), PagerDuty will automatically escalate to the level-two responder, and so on. You can notify up to 10 users/schedules (50 on Standard and Enterprise plans) in a single escalation rule, and we support up to 20 escalation rules for each escalation policy.

We will attempt to send all PagerDuty phone call notifications from the number 1-415-349-5750. Some providers automatically change the caller ID, so the number(s) you receive the calls from may be displayed differently. See the following FAQ entry for SMS notifications.

The phone number that will show up on your caller ID for SMS notifications will depend on which SMS provider we use, as well as which country you live in. PagerDuty uses multiple SMS providers per country for availability and redundancy reasons. You can use the below numbers to set up special ringtones on your phone, but please be aware that they might change at any time with little notice. Please also see our vCard for additional numbers.

USA Primary Number: PDUTY (73889), 42752, or 43105

Backup numbers:

281-724-3738

206-455-7176

206-455-7376

206-538-2743

206-538-2204

415-349-5750

682-232-0692

682-232-0687

657-206-4429

657-206-4067

682-232-4015

682-232-0663

682-206-3845

754-206-1085

754-206-1088

754-206-1089

415-363-9907

415-363-9908

415-363-9911

415-363-9915

415-363-9916

415-862-4200

415-862-4201

Canada Primary Number: 604-210-6232

Backup numbers:

587-880-2201

587-880-2200

587-409-6519

438-793-9519

438-793-9416

778-652-4416

United Kingdom: +44 2033 224573

Backup numbers:

+44 7860 026813

+44 7507 333186

Australia: +61 416 906 354/h3>
Backup number:

+61 429 883 475

+61 419 353 272

Spain: +34 911 067 132

Backup number: Varies*

Hungary: +36 70 717 7404

Backup number: Varies*

Other European Countries: +44 7860 026813

Backup number: Varies*

+49 177 1781348

+49 177 1789322

+46 76-943 60 15

+33 6 44 63 06 88

+33 6 44 63 02 68

+33 6 44 63 99 56

+33 6 44 63 02 90

+33 6 44 63 96 79

All Other Countries: Numbers Vary*

*Note: some phone numbers use local SMS numbers that can vary between messages or day-to-day.

No. PagerDuty is a platform for agile incident management, not a monitoring system. Think of PagerDuty as an add-on to trigger the right actions to all the data from your existing monitoring tools. PagerDuty provides sophisticated event management as well as infrastructure health visualizations to identify patterns and trends, but leaves finding problems with your systems to your existing monitoring tools.

Every service you create in PagerDuty has a unique email address, such as nagios-problem@acme.pagerduty.com. PagerDuty opens a new incident and begins the notification process at soon as one of your monitoring tools sends an email to a service’s address.

PagerDuty employs active-active architecture, and our infrastructure is fully replicated in three different AWS and Microsoft Azure data centers. We have the capability to rapidly rollover to our backup systems in the event that our main data center loses connectivity. We also ensure redundancy across the rest of our system including notification providers, DNS providers, and more.

We advise using an external ping service such as BasicState or Wormly to monitor your network connection and mail server. Of course, you can forward the error messages from these monitoring services to one of your PagerDuty services. This way, if your site loses network connectivity or your mail server crashes, the on-call engineer will be immediately notified by PagerDuty.

You can find our price schedule here. All new PagerDuty accounts come with fully-featured, risk-free 14 day trial (no credit card required). During the free trial, you’ll be able to send phone calls and SMSes free of charge. If you decide not to register for a paid plan within the 14 day trial window, your account will expire at the end of the trial.